The Quality of Transport and Environmental Protection, Part I

The today main challenge to protect the environment through the development of new and more efficient transportation systems is presented. The absolutely necessary goods distribution and human transfers are polluting and damaging the environment and new solution should be envisaged; the conflicting strategies to adopt new types of environment friendly transportation while maintaining operative the more economically convenient, but largely polluting, already existing machines are discussed and compared. Shipment is an activity that is occurring since the existence of man who felt the need to find ways for him and his goods transportation. Physical human body limits have led to the discovery of a variety of systems for a continuous transportation evolution. This work analyzes the new environment friendly technologies that have been recently developed or that could be further implemented in the next near future. In view of the constantly improvement of the quality of transportation to be carried out, the transportation sector has various aspects that need to be investigated. Passenger comfort, flexible design, maximum interior space, safety and greater range are main features that improve transportation efficiency while making these technologies more familiar and accepted by consumers. Avoiding any excessive generalization, the three major transportation interacting branches, namely, infrastructures, vehicles and management have been reviewed. Such a complex system needed the application of an evolutionary design approach considering renewable energy sources for Hydrogen production as well as electric or internal combustion engines. The overall transportation network and related terminals have been involved as infrastructures, while all aspects of design, construction, operation diagnostics and traffic interactions have been considered for the vehicles. Finally, the management of the engineering responsibilities chain to ensure quality, safety and environmental impact of the transportation systems has been assessed.